TIME & LITERARY RANDEZVOUS (CHANEL)
This literature course explores how great writers refract their world and how their works are transformed when they intervene in our global cultural landscape today.
No national literature has ever grown up in isolation from the cultures around it; from the earliest periods, great works of literature have probed the tensions, conflicts, and connections among neighboring cultures and often more distant regions as well.
Focusing mainly on works of literature that take the experience of the broader world as their theme, this course will explore the varied artistic modes in which great writers have situated themselves in the world, helping us to understand the deep roots of today’s intertwined global cultures.
https://pll.harvard.edu/course/masterpieces-of-world-literature?delta=2
This foundational course for English concentrators examines literary form and genre. We explore some of the many kinds of literature as they have changed over time, along with the shapes and forms that writers create, critics describe, and readers learn to recognize. The body of the course looks to the great literary types, or modes, such as epic, tragedy, and lyric, as well as to the workings of literary style in moments of historical change, producing the transformation, recycling, and sometimes the mocking of past forms. While each version of English 20 includes a different array of genres and texts from multiple periods, those texts will always include five major works from across literary history: Beowulf (epic), King Lear (tragedy), Persuasion (comic novel), The Souls of Black Folk (essays; expository prose), and Elizabeth Bishop’s poems (lyric). The course integrates creative writing with critical attention: assignments will take creative as well as expository and analytical forms.
Read the article below, paraphrase it and answer following questions:
1. Why do people spend their time reading „trash“?
2. How to differentiate between „trash“ and high standard literature?
3. What are the advantages of reading good books?
4. Can journalistic expertise help to write a quality text?
What makes a good story?
A good story is about something the audience decides is interesting or important. A great story often does both by using storytelling to make important news interesting.
The public is exceptionally diverse. Though people may share certain characteristics or beliefs, they have an untold variety of concerns and interests.
So anything can be news. But not everything is newsworthy. Journalism is a process in which a reporter uses verification and storytelling to make a subject newsworthy.
At its most basic level, news is a function of distribution -– news organizations (or members of the public) create stories to pass on a piece of information to readers, viewers, or listeners.
A good story, however, does more than inform or amplify. It adds value to the topic.
The Elements of Journalism, in fact, describes journalism as “storytelling with a purpose.”
Creating a good story means finding and verifying important or interesting information and then presenting it in a way that engages the audience. Good stories are part of what make journalism different, and more valuable, than other content in the media universe.
Research proves two things about good stories:
Treatment trumps topic. How a story is told is more important to the audience than its topic, what it is about. The best story is a well-told tale about something the reader feels is relevant or significant.
The best stories are more complete and more comprehensive. They contain more verified information from more sources with more viewpoints and expertise. They exhibit more enterprise, more reportorial effort.
This guide, like many of the others in API’s Journalism Essentials section, is largely based on the research and teachings of the Committee of Concerned Journalists — a consortium of reporters, editors, producers, publishers, owners and academics that for 10 years facilitated a discussion among thousands of journalists about what they did, how they did it, and why it was important. The author, Walter Dean, was CCJ training director and API Executive Director Tom Rosenstiel formerly co-chaired the committee.
https://www.americanpressinstitute.org/journalism-essentials/makes-good-story/Similar to Chanel´s „Literary Rendezvous At Rue Cambon“ choose one of your favourite books and prepare a presentation on its plot, genre and literary form. Be persuasive and make a recommendation. (Make yourself familiar with the definitions of „genre“ and „literary form“ first).
What is creative writing?
Write a short text. Consider the points mentioned in the article „What Makes a Good Story“ (Assignment 1).
Western civilisation offers time without depriving people of a high living standard.
This project intends to show how to transform another luxury of the Western world, i.e. free time, into quality time. One of the possibilities is to occupy oneself with good literature.
It should point out the advantages of reading high quality books of different genres, thus using the time we have at our disposal meaningfully. If possible, at any age.
It should help to learn what makes valuable reading to be able to make good recommendations and pass this knowledge on to our children, which is about creating sustainable value as a strong foundation for a meaningful and successful life.
